Fabulous Marsport featured on the cover

A sixth-grade boy reports that World War IV has rendered the planet uninhabitable, and that Jack Commer and the crew of Typhoon I must spearhead Earth’s evacuation to Mars.

Paperback from Amazon
Paperback from lulu.com
eBook from Amazon
The Complete Book on YouTube

Typhoon I blasts off for Mars

Porting Trip to Mars to Amazon was an experiment in translating the 2017 lulu.com paperback, 7” x 9” and still available there, to Amazon’s widest landscape format at 8.5” x 6”. At some point I may see about making a larger size, but for now, I’m happy with the Amazon version; its size feels right. The slight difference in rectangular ratio between the two versions mandated some finagling with the images and with font sizes for best fit, but that was again a good learning experience. But the images and text are the same as the 2017 version.

Einstein’s special theory of relativity explains why the moon is about to explode.

Along the way I learned about formatting images for bleeding off the page; all in all this has been a worthwhile endeavor, and I hope having the book on Amazon offers it to a wider audience. I had fun illustrating this book and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. Even its sixth-grade origins have a certain charm for readers.

I also elected to put Trip to Mars out as a Kindle eBook, even though I expected a picture book to be a bit rough in eBook format. But the landscape images work well when viewed in landscape. Yes, that means you have to turn your phone or tablet sideways.

Jack flees a nuclear explosion with the secret plans for a new city of Mars.

For more background, I see no reason to repeat or plagiarize my previous post about the book, Trip to Mars, the Picture Book, or, How the Ship Became a Fantastical Theater Stage.

copyright 2025 by Michael D. Smith